General Dan Van Quang

By Bobby Ghosh / WashingtonWednesday, Oct. 28, 2009

Larry Burrows / Time Life / Getty

There are parallels with Ahmed Wali Karzai here too. Quang, special military adviser to President Nguyen Van Thieu, was widely believed to have been a heroin trafficker. This led to considerable friction between the CIA, which valued Quang as an asset, and the U.S. military, which saw him as a crook. Quang moved to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon; after a trip to Canada in 1975, he was barred from returning to the U.S. until 1989, when the State Department cleared him of all drug charges.